Emily Gould stood posing for a photograph on West 29th Street in front of the building where she works, wearing a stone-colored cardigan, her hair scraped back into a messy ponytail, her only concession to vanity a slash of red lipstick applied with apparent indifference.

Apparent, since Ms. Gould, who is nothing if not self-aware, seemed to be working a look meant to deflect unwelcome stares. “Attention,” she said in an interview earlier this month, “is not a commodity I’m interested in.”

Come again? Ms. Gould, 32, had after all made her name soliciting just the kind of notice she now disdains. On her blog, Emily magazine, she regaled her readers, scores of young women who, like herself, were lurching toward adulthood, with saucy observations about her professional and romantic travails and the minutiae of day-to-day life: her wardrobe dilemmas, her boyfriend’s peccadilloes, even her cat’s gnarly dental disorders.

Indeed, a case could be made that Ms. Gould’s warts-and-all brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s quasi-autobiographical hit on HBO.

So it comes as a jolt to learn that this self-proclaimed doyenne of cyber oversharing has hit the refresh button, turning her back on the medium that shaped her career.

Next month Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish “Friendship,” Ms. Gould’s often transparently autobiographical novel of two women scrabbling to find love, but mostly to make ends meet, in the unforgiving climate of New York in the early 2000s. She wrote the book, she said, “to invite something new into my life.”

She has little interest in revisiting her early blog posts, an exercise, she said, paraphrasing a character in “Friendship,” about as compelling as “examining a box of old fingernail clippings.”

At the peak of her influence more than a half-dozen years ago, Ms. Gould “was at the forefront of a kind of movement,” said Miles Klee, a novelist and reporter at the DailyDot.com, which covers social media, “making transparency into its own art form.”

Among her most visible successors in the genre is Ms. Dunham, a magnet to the younger sisters of a crowd that once doted on Ms. Gould’s every quip and abject rumination.

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Ms. Gould in her office at 29th Street Publishing.CreditSteven Brahms for The New York Times

Ms. Gould remembered attending a party in Brooklyn that Ms. Dunham had crashed. Guests were delighted when she ushered them into her place in the same building. “Her boyfriend was there,” Ms. Gould said. “I was scrutinizing her bookshelf. I assumed people had sent her those books for free.”

The experience sent her into a funk. “I was jealous,” she said. “Every woman around my age who hopes to create something is jealous of Lena Dunham.”

Like Ms. Dunham, Ms. Gould was in her early 20s when she achieved the sort of celebrity — no, make that notoriety — strivers her age only dream of. When the website Gawker called, she promptly ditched her position at a publishing house to apply her sting to American celebrity culture, in particular the bloated pretensions of the Manhattan media elite. The site had cast itself as an audacious societal leveler, taking refreshing, certainly titillating, but more often gratuitous pokes at the privileged and the mighty. Ms. Gould saw herself as a crusader, an advocate of guerrilla journalism spun out in real time to give readers a feeling they were in on the action.

In her brief but high-profile tenure as Gawker’s editor, she had little sense of her impact. “When I started, Gawker was this little gnat,” she said. “But in the year I worked there, it seemed it had become this rhinoceros. I didn’t realize that something I had written offhandedly would become the No. 1 Google search topic for the day.”

Funny, vicious and nakedly irreverent, her posts were so aggressive at times that they managed to incense even the customarily affable Jimmy Kimmel. While sitting in for Larry King on Mr. King’s talk show in 2007, he called her out on the show for irresponsible reporting and flagrant invasions of privacy. “You throw rocks at celebrities,” he scolded, then told her straight-faced: “I would hate to see you arriving in hell, and somebody writing a text message and saying, ‘Guess who’s here.’ ”

Looking back on the episode, the first of a series of public excoriations, Ms. Gould acknowledged, “I probably went around systematically rubbing people the wrong way for the first part of my career.”

Before long she herself become a piñata, subjected to random bashings by readers who took issue with, among other things, her perceived status-chasing and shameless self-involvement.

Around that time a friend warned her, “You’re not riding the wave, you’re swimming in the ocean in front of the wave that’s about to crash,” Ms. Gould said. “The wave crashed on me.”

She clung all the same to the gadfly role. “She’s been a lightning rod for controversy as long as I’ve known her,” said Bennett Madison, a writer and friend since middle school. “Working at Gawker forced her to ask, ‘Is this the person I want to be?’ ”

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The writer with Keith Gessen, the author and critic. They are to marry in October.CreditFrances Duncan

It came to her, Ms. Gould recalled, “that there’s a difference between being honest and just being scattershot.” Spreading gossip and maligning public figures, she said, “is not useful as a critical stance.” In 2007, at the end of a long, desultory post, she told her readers, Yup. I’m quitting.

The next year, she wrote an 8,000 word confessional for The New York Times Magazine, remarked upon not only for its content but for a cover that showed Ms. Gould sprawled languidly on an unmade bed, her signature poppy tattoos exposed, her amber hair fanned out on rumpled sheets.

In the article Ms. Gould described the negative fallout from her television appearance and the subsequent panic attacks that had sent her, quaking, into therapy. She tried to contextualize her experience. “No wonder we’re ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone,” she wrote. “We’re constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.”

Amen. But readers consigned her to type, casting Ms. Gould, who grew up in suburban Maryland, her mother a court-appointed lawyer, her father a public relations executive, as an overeducated (she went to Kenyon) and hyper-privileged city girl. Online, they raced to pillory her.

In the readers’ comments section, a woman who said she was a contemporary wrote, “Please stop embarrassing our generation with mindless prattle.” Ritnyc of Manhattan wrote, “The alluring cover of the magazine indicates that she does have, despite exceptionally modest writing skills, an excellent complexion.”

Resilient as a Slinky, Ms. Gould came back with a memoir in 2010, “And the Heart Says Whatever,” in which she chronicled her culinary adventures, yoga classes, up-and-down relationships and jobs she despised. Casting about for a way to position the book, the publishers suggested touting her as “the voice of her generation.” “Can’t we just say, ‘a voice?’ ” Ms. Gould remembered pleading. The words came back to haunt her when, as chance would have it, they were echoed by Ms. Dunham on “Girls.”

As for the memoir, for which Ms. Gould received a $200,000 advance, it sold fewer than 10,000 copies, respectable, to be sure, but anemic by industry standards. Between soothing sips of camomile tea in early June, Ms. Gould assessed the damage. She could not have anticipated that her followers would turn on her, uncorking the geysers of vitriol that had been her stock in trade, she said.

Mr. Klee recalled the consensus among writers: “Here’s someone to be jealous of and kind of hate. She’s putting herself out there and she scored this killer book deal.” He has since revised that view. “As I got to read more of her, I found a very sharp, very funny observer,” he said. “I appreciate her inside, smart gloss on whatever is happening at the moment.”

Ms. Gould remains her own most unsparing critic. “The eye that she turns on the world she also turns on herself,” said Mr. Madison.

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Ms. Gould on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 2008 that featured her confessional.

She seems bent these days on renouncing her membership in the community of bloggers, whom she characterizes as “that tiny subset of outliers who are live-tweeting their mammogram the next day.”

And she is quick to acknowledge her role in feeding the culture of self-veneration and snark. “I was a big gossip with a big mouth,” she said, “and the Internet enabled me to do that on a really grand scale.”

In the seven years since she left Gawker and wrote about it, “I’ve mostly apologized personally to the people I’ve offended,” she said.

“I wish I could say after all that public shaming, at least I have my beautiful shoes, my beautiful apartment,” said Ms. Gould, who lives in the sluggishly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, in a building next to a bar called One Last Shag. “But at that point I didn’t have anything; I had less than anything,” having earned, as she lamented in an online article earlier this year, a total of $7,000 in 2011, the year she embarked on her novel.

She has, it would seem, found emotional sustenance in the steady routine, and reliable income, provided by her job at 29th Street Publishing. The company, which creates cross-platform content for new magazines and websites, helped her build Emily Books, which she founded with Ruth Curry, her best friend and a writer like herself. An e-book venture with some 150 subscribers, Emily Books resurrects cult favorites, out-of-print works and others by mostly female authors. The goal, Ms. Gould said, “is to make sure that the writers we cared about were not forgotten.”

Ms. Gould, who once prided herself on having dodged the kind of day job that had her “shopping the sale rack at Club Monaco for office appropriate outfits,” as she once wrote, has adopted a variation of “dress for success.” She appeared at her interview in a conventional blazer and pants, accessorized, subversively, with raucously striped socks and gray sneakers. That sartorial wink aside, she’s no renegade, she said, adding playfully if somewhat opaquely: “I’ve never tried heroin. And I’ve had sex with very few women.”

In October she is to marry her longtime boyfriend, Keith Gessen, the author and critic, and, like Ms. Gould, a mainstay of Brooklyn’s young literary set.

He helped her through four years of struggling to forge fictional characters that resemble Ms. Gould and her friend Ms. Curry only in their barest outlines. Amy, who at least at the outset functions as Ms. Gould’s alter-ego, has yet to bounce back from the collapse of a career that brought her premature fame. Bev, a graduate school dropout, finds solace and meaning in an unplanned pregnancy and the kind of unglamorous retail job that Ms. Gould might once have disdained.

Money, in her fictional universe, is the new sex. “I was obsessively thinking about it every day that I was working on the book,” she said. “I saw sex through the lens of money, and marriage though the lens of money. You can buy a lot of power in your relationship if you’re the breadwinner.”

But money and power are less likely to move her these days than the promise of, as marketers would have it, reimagining her brand. She is working, she said, on developing a moral compass, creating a persona that is the circumspect, do-the-right-thing of the Emily of Gawker infamy.

Sure, the past still smarts. “But I’m not kept up nights with remorse,” Ms. Gould said evenly. “And if anyone is kept up nights for seven years, they might want to get a better therapist.”